In an industrial printer system, a printer is typically configured to print different types of information on various types of information carriers, such as items, products or articles. One example of an operation of such a printer is the printing of print information on various types of packages or consumer goods. Commonly, such packages or consumer goods require a great deal of product identifications and content specifications, such as, for example, traceability data, serial numbers, time and dates of packaging, expiry dates, etc. Therefore, the print information to be printed on the package or consumer goods may vary from one item to the next in a batch of items, from one batch of items to another, from one site of manufacture to another, from one time of manufacture to another, from one type of print technology to another, etc.
The term industrial in industrial printer and industrial printer system may refer to that it is related to or characterized by industry, that it is designed or suitable for use in industry. Industry may be described as the process of making products by using machinery and factories.
The print information may comprise both print information data and print information instructions. The print information data may comprise, for example, references to printer ready bitmap images, such as, e.g. barcodes, or the print ready information to be printed as is; while the print information instructions on the other hand may comprise, for example, code algorithms for the printer to determine print information data on-the-fly, i.e. as it is being printed, such as, e.g. incremental enumerations, or coded instructions indicating how the print information data is to be printed on the information carrier. This print information also conforms into a specific print information format.
It is often desired to verify that a code or information has been printed for several reasons: whether the correct information is printed, whether the information is printed in a visual and intangible form, if the industrial printer malfunctions, for example, an operator is notified to fix the malfunction, etc. In order to verify that a code or information has been printed on an information carrier, an image capturing device such as e.g. a camera may capture an image of the print information.
Today, it is possible to verify the presence of print information, i.e. that something has been printed. Today, the industrial printer knows what print information it should print on the information carrier (both static and dynamic print information). The industrial printer may also be the one that calculates at least part of the print information (e.g. the dynamic part). The industrial printer provides the image capturing device with information about the print information so that the image capturing device knows what information to expect on the information carrier. After the industrial printer has printed the print information on the information carrier, the image capturing device (which works in a batch mode) captures an image of the print information in order to verify the presence of the print information. The term batch mode is used in manufacturing to denote that a number of produced items or goods are part of the same batch, e.g. produced from the same raw material(s) and with the same manufacturing setup so that they can be considered to have the same qualities.
An example method of the current method in a printer system will now be described with reference to FIG. 1 and FIG. 2. FIG. 1 illustrates an example of the printer system. The printer system illustrated in FIG. 1 comprises an industrial printer 101 and an image capturing device 105. The industrial printer 101 and the image capturing device 105 are adapted to communicate with each other. In addition to being adapted to capture an image, the image capturing device 105 may be adapted to process the captured image. An information carrier 107 travels on a conveyor belt 110 in the direction of the arrow in FIG. 1. When the information carrier 107 travels on the conveyor belt 110 it first passes the industrial printer 101 and then the image capturing device 105. In some embodiments, the image capturing device 105 may be collocated with a processing device. The method in FIG. 2 comprises at least some of the following steps, which steps may be performed in any suitable order than described below:
Step 201
Based on a trigger, the industrial printer 101 determines print information which is to be printed on the information carrier 107.
Step 202
When the information carrier 107 passes the industrial printer 101, the industrial printer 101 prints the print information which was determined in step 201 on the information carrier 107. As seen in the example in FIG. 1, the information carrier 107 may travel on a conveyor belt.
Step 203
The industrial printer 101 sends information about the print information to an image capturing device 105. Step 203 may be performed after step 201 or after step 202.
Step 204
The image capturing device 105 receives and stores the print information. The image capturing device 105 now has knowledge about what information the industrial printer 101 has or is going to print on the information carrier 107.
Step 205
The image capturing device 105 captures an image of the print information on the information carrier 107 when the information carrier 107 enters the field of view of the image capturing device 105.
Step 206
The image capturing device 105 may process the captured image by for example comparing the captured image with the print information which it received from the industrial printer 101 in step 204. In some embodiments, the processing of the captured image may be performed by a standalone processing device (not shown in FIG. 2, but illustrated in FIG. 3). In such embodiment, the image capturing device 105 may transmit the captured image to the image processing device for processing. After processing, the image processing device may send information about the result of the processing to the image capturing device 105, i.e. whether the print information is correct or incorrect.
Step 207
If the result of the processing in step 206 indicates that the print information is incorrect, the image capturing device 105 may determine to reject the information carrier which carries the print information. The image capturing device 105 may send instructions to e.g. a rejection device to reject the information carrier 107. That the print information is incorrect may involve that parts of or the complete print information may be missing, that parts or the complete print information does not correspond to what the industrial printer 101 determined in step 201, that there are issues with the quality of the print information (e.g. the print information is unreadable or inaccurate) etc.
Steps 201-207 in FIG. 2 are repeated until the end of the batch of information carriers 107.
The current method can handle cases where parts of the codes are missing on a product, when there are issues with the quality of the code or when the code information is inaccurate due to e.g. an operator mistake. However, this requires the print information to be sent from the industrial printer 101 to the image capturing device 105 for every print, or for the print information to be sent from the image capturing device 105 to the industrial printer 101 for every print and to compare that the results from the industrial printer 101 and image capturing device 105 are matching. This solution is limited to the information transfer speed between the industrial printer 101 and the image capturing device 105.